by Harris, Dan
By now the congregants had filed out of the sanctuary, so that’s where we went to sit down and have our formal interview. As we talked, it became clear that Ted was a different breed from his fiery forebears on the Religious Right, figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy. He was part of a new generation of pastors who were trying to broaden the evangelical agenda beyond gay marriage and abortion. In some ways, he was more like a self-help guru. He’d written a series of books on things like making your marriage last and saving your neighbors from going to hell. He’d even published a weight loss guide, The Jerusalem Diet. To be sure, he was against abortion and homosexuality, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk about it.
After the interview, as the crew was breaking down their lights and packing up their gear, Ted sat down on the stairs leading up to the main stage and patted the step next to him. My first instinct was to make an excuse, figuring this was going to devolve into some sort of proselytizing session. But to beg off would have been rude, so I plopped down reluctantly, only to be pleasantly surprised by the conversation that ensued. With the cameras off, Ted toned down his eagerness a notch and began speaking with bracing frankness about the state of the evangelical scene in America.
“Can we talk off the record?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said, thinking, This could get interesting.
“There’s a huge difference between what I do as a pastor and what people like Jim Dobson do.” Dobson was the head of Focus on the Family, whose main office was right down the road and was so large it actually had its own zip code. Dobson was a pillar of old-school orthodoxy, a firebrand, and an avid critic of gays and “abortionists.”
“I have an actual congregation that I see face-to-face every week,” Ted added, “so I see what their real issues are, like their marriages, children, and finances. If I’m consistently negative, it doesn’t help them. Dobson, on the other hand, runs what’s called a ‘parachurch ministry.’ His ministry grows in the midst of controversy, because that attracts interest and funds.”
I was a little surprised to hear a big-time pastor trash-talking another major figure in Evangelicalism. It seemed a little . . . unchristian. But it was certainly intriguing, and I was starting to like this guy. He was a bit of a paradox: overfriendly and yet likable, saccharine but also capable of knowing irony. I sat there on those steps well past the point dictated by politeness, and Ted patiently answered all the questions about Evangelicalism I would have been too embarrassed to ask anyone else. He didn’t make me feel inferior for being, as they called it in evangelical lingo, “unchurched,” and he didn’t try to convert me. He was also not defensive at all when I asked how biblical literalists reconciled the fact that different books in the Bible said different things about key details in the Jesus story. He beamed mischievously and said, “We have our ways.”
Sitting there with Pastor Ted, I realized, with genuine regret, how unthinkingly judgmental I’d been—not only of Ted, but of religious people, generally. It hit me that I’d blindly bought into the prevailing stereotypes. The Washington Post had once declared these people to be “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Pastor Ted’s story about the inner clashes of the movement put the “easy to command” notion to rest. As for my assumption about all religious people being unintelligent—Ted clearly wasn’t. Then again, neither were believers such as Tolstoy, Lincoln, and Michelangelo, not to mention contemporary people of faith like Francis Collins, the evangelical and scientist who led the charge to map the human genome.
Not only had I been unfair to people of faith by prematurely reaching sweeping, uninformed conclusions, but I’d also done myself a disservice. This beat could be more than just a chance to notch more airtime. Most people in America—and on the planet, for that matter—saw their entire lives through the lens of faith. I didn’t have to agree, but here was my chance to get under the hood and understand what was going on. More than that, I could approach faith coverage as a way to shed light instead of heat. At a time when religion had become so venomously divisive, thoughtful reporting could be a way to take audiences into worlds they’d never otherwise enter, and in the process demystify, humanize, and clarify. It was why I’d gotten into this business in the first place—to both get on TV and do meaningful work.
Shortly thereafter, I admitted to Wonbo that he was right; we could start covering this beat with more nuance without having to move to public radio.
I became so gung ho about improving my faith coverage that, in the spring of 2005, I packed a Bible in my luggage as I headed off for a reporting trip to Israel, Egypt, and Iraq. I figured if I was going to be a proper religion reporter, I should at least read the source material.
It was right before I left on this trip to the Middle East that I had my last encounter with Peter Jennings. We met in his office, ostensibly so he could brief me on what my reporting priorities should be. He opened, characteristically, with an insult. “There’s a perception,” he said, “that you’re not very good at this sort of overseas coverage.” Even though I was reasonably sure this was untrue—and probably just part of Peter’s never-ending psyops campaign—I felt compelled to defend myself. As soon as I started to stammer out some sort of objection, though, he cut me off and lectured me about the various stories he wanted me to produce for his broadcast while I was abroad. Then he abruptly took a call from his wife, Kayce. After cooing into the phone for a few minutes, he hung up and looked at me and said, “I have a piece of advice for you, Harris: Marry well—at least once.”
A few weeks later, I was sitting out on the veranda of our Baghdad bureau, Bible in hand, struggling to get through Leviticus, with all of its interminable discussions of how to slaughter a goat. I stood up in frustration to go back into the office to check my computer, and that’s when I spotted the message from Peter. It was a group email announcing that he had lung cancer.
I never saw him again. By the time I got home, he had taken medical leave. Just a few months later, he was gone. Despite the fear and frustration he had provoked in me over the preceding five years, I felt enormous affection for him, and the night he died was one of the few times I could remember crying as an adult.
Perhaps more than any other single person outside of my immediate family, he had genuinely altered the course of my life. He built me into a better journalist than I had ever imagined I could be, sending me all over the world, giving me the chance to get a taste of the same gritty, global education that he, a high school dropout, had gotten during his years as a foreign correspondent. He could be a massive pain in the ass, but he was, in his own funny way, very generous. He was a restless soul, an idealist, and a perfectionist—a man who definitely followed my dad’s “price of security” maxim. No matter how hard he was on me, I always knew he was exponentially harder on himself.
Interestingly, during the entire time I knew Peter, the subject of his personal faith never came up. It wasn’t until years after his death that I learned that Peter himself was not particularly religious at all. He hadn’t needed faith in order to see that religion was a vital beat for us to cover; he was simply an insatiably curious reporter with a peerless instinct for what would interest the audience.
Peter’s death set off a ripple of reassignments among the on-air staff. The network’s first choice to replace him was the anchor duo of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff, the correspondent I’d met in the presidential suite in the Islamabad Marriott. Only weeks after his ascent to the Big Chair, however, Bob was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and nearly died, which sent the news division reeling. Charlie Gibson from GMA was then tapped to move to the evenings, while Robin Roberts was elevated to be Diane Sawyer’s cohost.
Meanwhile, Ted Koppel had stepped down from Nightline and was replaced by the troika of Cynthia McFadden, Martin Bashir, and Terry Moran. I was then tapped to replace Terry on the Sunday edition of World News—a promotion I considered to be incalculably awesome.
In no way, however, did this
step up the ladder reduce my neuroses about work. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yes, it was insanely great to be given the steering wheel of the news division every Sunday night—to pick the stories we’d cover, frame how they were presented, and then deliver it all right from the chair that Peter Jennings once occupied. Whenever anyone asked me, I told them I had the best job on the planet. And I meant it. But perversely, my good fortune meant I now had that much more to lose, and thus that much more to protect.
And the competition all around had intensified. I’d been at the network for five years, and the ranks of younger people had filled out dramatically. It wasn’t just David Wright I had to watch out for. There was also: Chris Cuomo, the charismatic, strapping son of the famous former governor of New York, who had replaced Robin Roberts on GMA; Bill Weir, the hilariously funny and wildly creative former local sports anchor who’d been named as cohost of the newly created weekend edition of GMA; and David Muir, the eminently likable, ferociously hardworking anchorman who had been lovingly profiled in Men’s Vogue and was now helming the Saturday edition of World News.
My relationships with these newer additions were great—they were friends—but that didn’t change the fact that we were locked in a zero-sum competition for a scarce resource: airtime. Specifically, assignments to cover the big stories, as well as fill-in slots for when the A-list anchors were away.
The mental loop (How many stories have I had on this week? etc.) that began when I first arrived from local news went into hyperdrive, only with an even more personal tinge. It was one thing, back in the day, to be big-footed by a veteran correspondent—but to be beat out by someone my own age, now that stung. Like almost all correspondents, every day I would check the “rundowns” for various shows—the computerized lists of stories the broadcasts would be covering—to see who was doing which ones. If someone scored an assignment I wanted, I’d experience a brief rush of resentment.
I’d collect data points (Weir gets to cover the election of the new pope? Muir is filling in for Cuomo?), and immediately extrapolate to far-reaching conclusions (This means that x or y executive or anchor dislikes me → My career is doomed → I’m going to end up in a flophouse in Duluth). Sometimes, before I’d even thought it through, I’d find myself on the phone with an executive producer of one of our broadcasts, saying impolitic things.
I would occasionally complain about all of this to Dr. Brotman, who applied his perfect shrink-y mix of sympathy and skepticism. He had a competitive job, too, negotiating the executive ranks at his hospital, but often he thought I was blatantly overreacting to intramural developments at ABC. In fact, his theory was that, just as I had used drugs to replace the thrill of combat, I was now inflating the drama of the office war zone to replace drugs.
Maybe. I was conflicted. I was absolutely aware that worrying could be counterproductive. Furthermore, I did not enjoy harboring competitive feelings toward people I liked and admired. But I still firmly believed that a certain amount of churning was unavoidable, especially in this business, and I had no intention of abandoning the whole “price of security” thing.
During this period, as I continued to deal with the aftermath of my panic attacks, my residual drug cravings, and the intensifying competitive pressures of work, it never once occurred to me that any aspect of the religious traditions I was reporting on could be relevant or useful to me personally. Faith was proving an increasingly interesting beat to cover for journalistic reasons, but it wasn’t serving the same purpose for me as it did for all the believers I was meeting: answering my deepest questions, or speaking to my most profound needs.
That said, I continued with my plan for broadening our coverage beyond the hot buttons of the culture wars. I went to Salt Lake City to profile the Apostles of the Mormon Church; I interviewed the head of a Wiccan coven in Massachusetts; I even covered the annual American Atheists convention. On Wonbo’s urging, we launched a series called “Tests of Faith,” which included stories about a Unitarian congregation in California agonizing over whether to accept a registered sex offender, and also about an Episcopal priest who claimed that, after a profound conversion experience, she now believed in both Christianity and Islam.
I kept covering the born-again scene, of course. It was too juicy—and too newsy—to ignore. And with Ted Haggard, I now had a terrific inside source to make sure my coverage was more accurate and nuanced. He became my first stop when I was looking for candid answers about evangelicals. He was always willing to respond to questions off the record, returning emails instantaneously from his private AOL account.
When Pat Robertson publicly suggested that the United States send “covert agents” to assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, Ted was the only major evangelical figure to go on the record about it, saying, “Pat was not speaking for Christianity.” I did the interview from an edit room at our offices in New York City, where I could see Ted on a monitor, beamed in via satellite from Colorado. When it was over, we exchanged a few pleasantries and Ted good-naturedly made fun of me for having worn an ugly green tie on television the night before.
Not long afterward, he and his top lieutenant, a crisp young guy named Rob, came to New York, and I took them out to a fancy restaurant for lunch. Ted seemed impressed by the whole Manhattan scene. Over the gentle clinking of silverware and with a view of Central Park, he continued to pull back the curtain on the inner workings of American Evangelicalism. He told me how he and Jim Dobson had clashed over Ted’s desire to focus evangelicals on issues like global warming. In Ted’s account, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering included behavior that was surprisingly ruthless.
It was fun to talk to Ted. You might think that the yawning cultural and philosophical gap between us—he was a guy who believed that he had a running dialogue with Jesus, after all—would make a genuine connection impossible, but that clearly wasn’t the case.
While I liked Ted, it was also pretty obvious that he had a dual agenda: to promote the faith—and to promote himself. I was by no means the only reporter Ted was working. In fact, he played the media like a fiddle, doing interviews with Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters—and all that exposure worked. Since we’d met, Ted had been elected head of the National Association of Evangelicals, which had twenty-seven million members at forty-three thousand churches. Every Monday, he joined a conference call with the White House and other high-ranking Christians. Time put him on their list of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals.
Sometimes he pushed his shtick a little too far. He made a memorably creepy cameo in an HBO documentary about the American faith scene, in which he said, seemingly off-the-cuff, “You know, all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group.” In one interview with me, after I’d just asked him a series of questions about hot-button social issues, he stopped short in the middle of an answer. Then, while the cameras rolled, he said, “I hope I’m not coming across here as too harsh. Am I coming across as too harsh? I’m just going to focus on how cute Dan is, and then I won’t seem so harsh.” I had no idea how to deal with this comment other than to laugh and shift uncomfortably in my chair.
Notwithstanding Ted’s foibles, he’d helped me become utterly at ease around people who said “God bless you” when I hadn’t sneezed. Increasingly, I even now found myself in the position of defending evangelicals to my friends and family. Once, when I made a passing reference to “evangelical intellectuals,” a relative quipped, “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I—two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly—were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they w
ere perfectly nice about it.
Then early one November morning in 2006, I was groggily rooting around the Internet, looking for stories. I started each day with an email to the senior producers of World News, pitching pieces I could do for that night’s show. And there it was on Drudge: an article saying that Ted Haggard had been accused by a male escort of paying for sex as well as for crystal meth. I immediately assumed it must be a mistake, or a smear. I was so convinced it couldn’t be true that I didn’t even include it in my pitch email. A short while later, when one of the senior producers from Good Morning America called to ask me about it, I confidently assured her it must be false.
But then the story took on real legs. The male escort, a beefy, incongruously soft-voiced man named Mike Jones, seemed pretty credible. He said he’d had repeated encounters with a man who called himself “Art.” In an interview with our ABC affiliate in Denver, Jones said, “It was not an emotional relationship. It was strictly for sex.” He explained that this had gone on for years, but that when he saw Ted/Art on television backing a ballot initiative that would ban gay marriage, he decided he had to come forward. “He is in the position of influence of millions of followers and he’s preaching against gay marriage,” he said, “but behind everyone’s back doing what he’s preached against.” Making matters worse for Ted, Jones had voice mails, on which he claimed Ted could be heard arranging assignations and drug deals. On one of them, a male voice said, “Hi, Mike, this is Art, just calling to see if we can get any more supply.” It was unmistakably Ted.
I was thunderstruck. No one I knew had ever taken me by surprise quite like this. The clean-cut, Indiana-raised, God-fearing Ted Haggard—a father of five and the spiritual shepherd to thousands—had been leading a double life. I had been in contact with the guy for years and had never had even the slightest inkling. In hindsight, there might have been a few signs: that all of his lieutenants were young and male; that time he called me “cute.” But really, none of that would have foretold the panoramic collapse that was now playing out.